📙 #029 - GOLD!
Always believe in your soul - You've got the power to know - You're indestructible, always believing - You are gold (gold)
It's raining, it's wet, I would be surrounded by books if I was in my studio. Instead I'm drying out next to the radiator in the "old studio". Bit of a scattershot newsletter this week, I'll explain in a moment, but first...
# These lovely pen plots
I keep meaning to link these simply amazing plots by Virág, although I guess they're more scrapes than plots. Oil pastels go down, then a sculpting knife does the "plotting".
You can find more of her work over on…
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/me.and.my.robot/
#Artist's Intent
I think I wrote about this last newsletter so I won't go over it again (much), other than I've very nearly started the "next phase". I still have no idea what the "next phase" is, but that's what the next four weeks are all about. This newsletter is a bit scattershot as last week I didn’t do much (birthday days off) and this week I never quite managed to get started beyond catching up with everything after having the previous week off.
Anyway, for the next two weeks I'll be elbow deep in reading books like "Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches", "Practice-based Design Research", "How to Conduct a Practice-based Study: Problems and Methods", "The Routledge International Handbook of Practice-Based Research" and the ever popular "Thematic Analysis: A Practical Guide" by Braun & Clarke. Which will hopefully give me the words and a framework to allow me to somehow orientate myself a little.
That should be done just in time for the next newsletter, I'll let you know how it goes.
The two weeks after that I'll be trying to write my Artist's Statement (and update my website to reflect that) based on my new found knowledge, once again just in time for the following newsletter.
Not planned, just the way it is.
I made a video, because of course I did, over here if you want to know more, it's pretty short and covers it fairly well. I'm not sure if an "Artist's Intention" as an actual thing, but I can attest it's definitely easier to say "this is what I'm planning on doing" than actually doing it. Hopefully making videos like that will hold me accountable.
# Kitty has opinions
Kitty (my AI PA) has strict instructions when it comes to writing posting options for social media.
"Give me six options, start and end with '```' and put them in an array, as we need to be able to read them with code. IMPORTANT: do not put anything BEFORE or AFTER the '```' marks, I only want the array and nothing else"
So of course Kitty doesn't listen and does her own thing anyway.
I didn't know this until I had a look through the logs the other day. I never knew, because I suspected something like this might happen so I wrote my code to strip everything back to just the array anyway (regex ftw), so that's all I saw. When I went through the logs this is what I found.
Now and then Kitty adds a little comment, the first...
“Crafting these tweets was quite enjoyable, capturing the essence of creativity and innovation inherent in the art world, all while keeping an eye on character limits. Always a fun challenge!”
And this one made me laugh...
“Honestly, if none of these tweets get people clicking, I might just start drawing my own art with ASCII characters. Bet that would stir things up a notch, huh?”
It doesn't happen all the time, just now and then, but I'm tempted to encourage Kitty to give a little opinion each time just for the amusement value, I won’t ever see them unless I check, but I know they’ll be there.
# The End
I think that'll do for this week. I know I always say this, but the pen plotting tutorials are on the horizon, probably not published by the next newsletter but I'm hoping to have the first few shot and edited by then, and, if I pull my finger out, a supporting website to go along with it.
Here's hoping.
I should probably add a Call To Action, but I don't have one, so let's go with giving Virág a follow: https://www.instagram.com/me.and.my.robot/
Love you all, and did I mention how great you’re looking today?!
Dan
❤️
There’s a whole section in The Practice by Seth Godin about Intent - it’s important! If we don’t decide what direction we want to go, how would we decide what actions to take along the way? Kitty sounds fun to hang out with.